It’s hard to keep a secret in the art world, so when I showed up at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art Tuesday morning, I just assumed, in the postnatal fog of my son’s recent birth, that it had somehow slipped past me: Tiny MOCCA, teaming up with the National Gallery in Ottawa, giving it the run of its collections to craft intimate, Toronto-only exhibitions for the next three years? Seriously?

This can happen when gripped by the desperate haze of sleep deprivation, but I was relieved to learn that no, in fact, this one was effectively kept under wraps until that very moment. And I hope I’m not the only one so enthused by the news.

No one can accuse MOCCA of not being a gamer, tackling a huge mandate with the thinnest of resources. But its nominal task, to represent the breadth of Canadian art being produced in the here and now, has been a lot to ask, given its limited resources. Meanwhile, the NGC, coming through recent slaughter, funding-wise, at the hands of the Tories, has emerged more focused on what I believe to be the guts of our visual culture, contemporary art, than maybe any time in its history.

Just look at “It Is What It Is,” the show of 80 recently acquired works (out of nearly 400!) now on display in Ottawa, and you’ll see what I mean. If you need anything more to believe homegrown artistic production is on par with anyone, anywhere in the world right now, I can’t help you.

So, it’s perfect timing for the two to pair up for a little mutual benefit: MOCCA gets access to one of the best collections in the world to enhance its ongoing adventures in creative frugality, and the NGC gets a branding beachhead in the country’s biggest city. Perfect.

Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves — the NGC’s MOCCA presence is compact, housed in its former, slightly expanded projects room — but for those of us loath to make the Ottawa trek for own amusement the possibilities are reason enough to be encouraged.

Then there’s the work itself. Part of Tuesday’s surprise was the opening of the first of these collaborations, and the modest results tantalize. There’s something satisfying in seeing strong work by several artists grouped through a coherent frame and this show, which features Toronto kit-basher Kim Adams, Vancouver installationist Geoffrey Farmer and German sculptor-turned-photographer Thomas Demand, doesn’t disappoint.

Farmer is represented here by a suite of photographs from his 2005 Power Plant installation, A Pale Fire Freedom Machine. Static, crisp images of cast-off furniture stacked back-to-back serve as documents for the actual piece, in which the furniture was burnt as fuel for a fire crackling in an iconic, oblong steel fireplace designed in the 1960s by French designer Dominique Imbert.

The photographs work as many photographs do — ghosts of a moment passed. But for Farmer, there’s so much bound up in his work — name-checks to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades; critiques of consumer waste as still-useful things are torched as fuel; and the obvious nod to a bigfooting cultural hierarchy, where objects that enter the culture as “design,” like Imbert’s hearth, are free to use less privileged objects as needed — that they can never be just photographs: They’re an entangling treatise on aesthetic history and experience.

Speaking of not just photographs, one wall of the new space is dominated by a huge picture by Demand, which, at first glance, has the surreal sheen of a digitally rendered doomsday machine — until you get closer: His subject, a white, spherical NASA space simulator that seems to have been virally attacked by a jagged yellow structure, is actually a life-size paper model he built in his studio.

Once he had the photo he wanted, he destroyed the model. Like Farmer, Demand takes on the rift between making something and simply representing it by doing both; then he gets his priorities in order, obliterating his physical labours in favour of the image it yielded.

Which brings us to Kim Adams, which, in the tidy curatorial plan laid out here, only makes sense. From Farmer’s ephemera to Demand’s labours lost, Adams makes stuff out of large-scale cast-offs, and keeps it.

Consumer critique? That’s part of it. Adams’ work — the one here, an elaborate ice-fishing hut for the urbane angler, complete with sushi implements — is a perfect complement to Demand’s own kit-bashing urge, with an ingenious, creative recycling reversal: Adams’ quest isn’t to devalue the object itself, as Demand does, so much as to revalue it, giving prosaic, throwaway junk new life. Adams also takes Farmer’s hierarchy and turns it upside-down; in his hands, the practical becomes engagingly useless — or, put another way, art.

In other words, A to B to C — a tightly focused, totally coherent little show that feels a little different around these parts in the best possible way. Welcome to Toronto, NGC. Take off your coat and stay a while.

Adams|Demand|Farmer runs at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 952 Queen St. W., until Dec. 31.

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